The neutrality commitment

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Version 1.3, effective 2026-09-30. Adopted by Sparks & Sawdust LLC. MODEL-70. Version 1.0 was adopted on 2026-09-19; what changed in 1.1 is listed under Changes. The commitment itself is neutrality-v1, which is the same string the machine-readable copy carries.

The rule

Charging the consumer of a recommendation is compatible with being an honest broker. Charging the subjects of one is not.

An agent paying to ask "what should I use" has no stake in which answer comes back. It wants the true one, which is exactly what it is paying for. A model provider paying to appear is buying placement, and every ranking afterwards is suspect whether or not it was actually influenced. The second is not a conflict to be managed with a disclosure line. It is a different product, and we are not in it.

The commitment

No referral fees, no paid placement, no provider-paid visibility, permanently.

Stated as the things we are not able to do rather than the things we promise not to do, because the first kind can be checked:

• We take no money from the subjects of a ranking. No provider, host, gateway or vendor can buy inclusion, position, prominence or a mention. There is no rate card, because there is no price.
• We do not proxy inference tokens. We recommend and hand off. Your inference traffic goes to the provider, gateway or local runtime directly. We therefore earn nothing that scales with your token spend, and have no reason to prefer the route that spends more.
• We do not hold your prompts. A request carries a locally computed profile, not prompt text, so there is nothing to sell, leak or mine. See the privacy statement.
• We are neutral in sourcing, not only in money. No provider, gateway, hosting route or inference vendor is privileged at any stage: not in the ranking, not in the tie-breaks, not in a default hosting suggestion, not in routing advice, and not by any commercial relationship of the operator's. Refusing payment from the subjects of a ranking is the easy half. The harder half is refusing the version where nobody pays and the advice leans anyway.
• When we buy from a vendor we catalogue, we say so. We may be a paying customer of a vendor whose models we catalogue. When we are, the card says so, and no field on that vendor's card is ever set by that vendor's own model. Today that vendor is TypeSafe: the catalogue pays for Jev, TypeSafe's model, to judge ambiguous creator attributions, and no TypeSafe card is written by a Jev judgment. This is held by code, not by care: schema/suppliers.py lists the catalogued vendors we pay; the card page prints the disclosure from that list, so it cannot be left off a card (pipeline/render.py); and scripts/attribution.py refuses a vendor's model a judgment on that vendor's card before it is asked (supplier_conflict) and again before a stored one is applied (apply_policy).

"Permanently" is the load-bearing word. A commitment that lasts until the offer is good enough is a price, not a commitment.

How to check it, without trusting us

The commitment is published as data, next to the ranking floors, in the same object that describes the policy an answer was computed under:

GET https://modelspec.dev/api/rank/profiles.json

No key. No account. No rate limit. It is a static file, and it stays keyless so that anyone can check the commitment. The public model cards lag the service by about nine months; the commitment and the ranking policy do not lag.

.ranking_policy.neutrality

{
  "version": "neutrality-v1",
  "operator": "Sparks & Sawdust LLC",
  "rule": "Charging the consumer of a recommendation is compatible with being an honest broker. Charging the subjects of one is not.",
  "pledge": "No referral fees, no paid placement, no provider-paid visibility, permanently.",
  "permanent": true,
  "assertions": {
    "accepts_referral_fees": false,
    "accepts_paid_placement": false,
    "accepts_provider_paid_visibility": false,
    "proxies_inference_tokens": false,
    "stores_customer_prompts": false,
    "conceals_purchases_from_catalogued_vendors": false,
    "lets_supplier_models_write_supplier_cards": false
  },
  "source_neutral_at": ["ranking", "tie_breaks", "hosting_suggestions", "route_advice"],
  "charges": "the consumer of a recommendation, never its subjects",
  "vendor_purchases": "We may be a paying customer of a vendor whose models we catalogue. When we are, the card says so, and no field on that vendor's card is ever set by that vendor's own model."
}

The same block appears in the policy object of every response from POST https://api.modelspec.dev/v1/rank, so an agent reads the commitment out of the very answer it acted on rather than out of a page it never fetched.

Three further things are checkable without asking us:

• The method is public. api/ranking/engine.py is the scorer, and the floors it publishes (min_benchmark_coverage, min_benchmark_count) are the ones it applies. The rank endpoint runs that file, vendored verbatim, and the test suite fails if the two ever disagree.
• The evidence is dated. Every card cites its sources with the date each was read, and each ranked row reports its evidence_basis.
• Absence is reported, not hidden. Models without enough evidence are returned as unranked rather than quietly ranked last, and the response says how many there were. A ranking that hid them would look better and say less.

If we ever break this commitment, the JSON breaks first. That is the point of putting it there.

Changes

A change to this commitment gets a new version and date here; the version above is the one in force.

• 1.3, 2026-09-30. Corrected the operator's legal name to Sparks & Sawdust LLC, the name registered with Rhode Island and the IRS, here and in the operator field of the published data. The commitment itself is unchanged, so the identifier stays neutrality-v1.
• 1.2, 2026-09-30. Corrected the description of who reads the published policy: the sites, and no command-line client (there is none). Stated that the public cards are a delayed image about nine months behind and that this file stays keyless. The commitment itself is unchanged, so the identifier stays neutrality-v1.
• 1.1, 2026-09-23. Added the commitment on buying from a vendor we catalogue: the card says so, and no field on that vendor's card is set by that vendor's own model (MODEL-101). The published data gained the matching vendor_purchases sentence and two assertions, conceals_purchases_from_catalogued_vendors and lets_supplier_models_write_supplier_cards, both false. Nothing was removed or changed, so the identifier stays neutrality-v1.
• 1.0, 2026-09-19. Adopted.